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$2.25 Trillion And ‘The Need To Really Deliver’
Joe Biden wants to tax corporations at a higher rate in order to help offset the cost of frivolous spending on things America doesn't need like bridges, transportation, factories, safe water service, roads and what The New York Times described as "a long list of other projects intended to create millions of jobs in the short run and strengthen American competitiveness in the long run."
What a waste of what could have been share buybacks!
I was planning to adopt a satirical cadence from start t
What’s not to like. For the GOP, all of it, of course. They hope to just kick the can down the road for two years to see how things come out. Conservative comes from the Latin root, conservo, meaning I save. The thing most conservatives seem to want to save is their now foggy memory of the past. So when change of any kind is mentioned the answer is no and the secondary reason is, NIH (not invented here). Oddly, there are Roman roads still in existence that are 2000 years old and still used. We don’t have any roads here with that kind of life. The Romans invented concrete and much of it is still curing. They used ground-up lava in a lot of their concrete and much of it is better than ours today. We got a lot of stuff to fix and endlessly waiting until the next election to get started isn’t working. The price is just getting higher and the work will be lousier because we can’t afford the good stuff. Easier to say no.
This country is composed nearly 100% by immigrants and their offspring. All the way back in the 1600s the folks who came here did so because they couldn’t be in charge of anything where they were, a condition arising from the ashes of the Middle Ages. They came here either to get someone off their back or to get on someone else’s. Those founding families were full of people who couldn’t wait to tell people, not themselves, what to do. They’re still here, following Mitch and his crowd to the same place they’ve always been headed, “no” land.
I find it disappointing that the rhetoric still talks about government spending rather than “investment”. The federal budget has a lot of spending to be sure and plenty of income transfers. But spending on a road or a bridge is a physical investment that is supposed to last a long time. I always thought that government accounting was flawed in this way. When a business spends 100mm on an investment that amortizes over a long period of time, they don’t expense it annually. I get that individuals and governments operate on a cash basis only- but really does it make any sense to show spending for a large government enterprise this way? Some investment is better than others. Since we have underinvested in education and infrastrucure for the last 40 years, it is a pretty good bet that there are a lot of high return projects out there. Since we can borrow long term at 2-2.5% it is likely that there are plenty of projects with a higher return out there to be done by government. (I am leaving out the idea of issuing currency for the moment).
Great points Ria.
Sustained, big picture, long-term oriented investment by government is now the only realistic way out of the trap of chronic underinvestment and historic balance sheet excess. They seem perhaps to have finally learned something after 12 years of silent depression. It is probably not ambitious enough, but at least they are starting to right the ship. I’m sure we’ll now watch the Republicans stonewall. As far as I understand, the reconciliation procedure cannot be used very often. Hopefully they can pass it the old fashioned way.
Indeed, you could I think make the case for spending $4 trillion a year on infrastructure alone. This plan reads like a bunch of Band-Aids in hopes things don’t completely come apart at the seams. Past studies said $2 trillion is what it would take to just stop the bleeding. Real investment in the future needs to be much larger and sustained. Just fixing failing sewer systems will cost over a trillion and that doesn’t include actually improving water treatment facilities, building desal plants for areas like FL. If we wait until we need it we will be years too late to address the issues.
Hey guess what? Larry Summers is on Bloomberg and he likes the plan! We can all rest easy now (sarcasm).